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A24 TECHNOLOGY
Saturday 13 OctOber 2018
Purging long-forgotten online accounts: Worth the trouble?

By BARBARA ORTUTAY birthday, until pressured to
AP Technology Writer do so after the breach.
NEW YORK (AP) — The inter- Even without these hurdles,
net is riddled with long-for- real life gets in the way.
gotten accounts on social There are probably good
media, dating apps and reasons you still haven’t or-
various shopping sites used ganized your closet, either.
once or twice. Sure, you Perhaps a better approach
should delete all those un- is to focus on the most sen-
used logins and passwords. sitive accounts. It might not
And eat your vegetables. matter than a news site still
And go to the gym. has your log in, if you nev-
But is it even possible to er gave it a credit card or
delete your zombie online other personal details (of
footprints — or worth your course, if you reused your
time to do so? bank password you might
Earlier this month, a little- be at risk).
used social network notified Rich Mogull, CEO of data
its few users that it will soon security firm Securosis, said
shut down. No, not Google people should think about
Plus; that came five days what information they had
later, following the disclo- provided to services they
sure of a bug that exposed In this March 27, 2018, file photo, a reporter holds a phone showing the Facebook app in San no longer use and whether
data on a half-million peo- Francisco. that information could be
ple. The earlier shutdown damaging should private
involved Path, created by use regularly. But for those fered the biggest publicly ping or event ticketing sites posts and messages inad-
a former Facebook em- you no longer use, consider disclosed hack in history, you bought one thing from vertently become public.
ployee in 2010 as an alter- a purge. Plus, it might feel exposing the names, email and forgot about. Dating sites, in particular,
native to Facebook. Then good to get your online life addresses, birth dates and Then, you’ll have to figure can be a trove of poten-
there’s Ello sending you in order, the way organiz- other information from 3 out which of your many tially damaging informa-
monthly emails to remind ing a closet does. billion active and dormant email accounts you used tion. Once you’re in a rela-
you that this plucky but Take dating apps such as accounts . This sort of infor- to log in to a service, then tionship, delete those ac-
little-known social network Tinder, long after you found mation is a goldmine for recover passwords and counts.
still exists somehow. a steady partner or gave up malicious actors looking to answer annoying security It’s wise to set aside a time
It might not seem like a on finding one. You might steal identities and gain ac- questions — assuming you each year — maybe af-
big deal to have these have deleted Tinder from cess to financial accounts. even remember what your ter you do your taxes or
accounts linger. But with your phone, but the ghost Trouble is, cleaning up your favorite movie or fruit was right after the holidays —
hacking in the news con- of your Tinder account is digital past isn’t easy. at the time. Only then might to manage old accounts,
stantly, including a breach still out there — just not get- For one, finding all the old you discover that you can’t said Theresa Payton, who
affecting nearly 30 million ting any matches, as Tinder accounts can be a pain. even delete your account. runs the security consult-
Facebook accounts, you shows only “active” users to For some of us, it might not Yahoo, for instance, didn’t ing company Fortalice So-
might not want all that potential mates. even be possible to recall allow users to delete ac- lutions and served under
data sitting around. Or consider Yahoo. Long every dating site and every counts or change person- President George W. Bush
You might not have a after many people stopped would-be Twitter that never ally identifying information as White House chief infor-
choice if it’s a service you using it, Yahoo in 2016 suf- was, not to mention shop- they shared, such as their mation officer. q

Facebook: Hackers accessed 29M

accounts, fewer than thought

50 million it initially believed breach was “fairly broad.” to “seize control” of those
were affected. It plans to send messages user accounts by stealing
The hackers accessed to people whose accounts digital keys the company
name, email addresses or were hacked. uses to keep users logged
phone numbers from these Facebook said third-party in. They could do so by ex-
accounts, according to apps and Facebook apps ploiting three distinct bugs
Facebook. For 14 million like WhatsApp and Insta- in Facebook’s code. The
of them, hackers got even gram were unaffected by company said it has fixed
more data, such as home- the breach. the bugs and logged out
town, birthdate, the last Facebook said the FBI is in- affected users to reset
10 places they checked vestigating, but asked the those digital keys.
into or the 15 most recent company not to discuss At the time, CEO Mark
searches. who may be behind the Zuckerberg — whose own
This July 16, 2013 file photo shows a sign at Facebook An additional 1 million ac- attack. The company said account was compro-
headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. counts were affected, but it hasn’t ruled out the pos- mised — said attackers
Associated Press hackers didn’t get any in- sibility of smaller-scale at- would have had the ability
MAE ANDERSON cessed data from 29 million formation from them. tacks that used the same to view private messages
AP Technology Writer accounts as part of the se- Facebook isn’t giving a vulnerability. or post on someone’s ac-
NEW YORK (AP) — Face- curity breach disclosed two breakdown of where these Facebook has said the at- count, but there’s no sign
book says hackers ac- weeks ago, fewer than the users are, but says the tackers gained the ability that they did.q